Author: Marta R. Stoeckel

Day 109: Wire Loops & Nuclear Reactions

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Physics: Wire Loops

My plan was for students to experiment with interactions between two wire loops with currents running through them, but we were not able to get much to happen with two loops. Instead, we ended up using some YouTube videos of the experiment to make observations. Students did get good results observing interactions between the wire loops and a magnet. This lab did provide a nice opportunity to revisit a common misconception from last week’s quiz, where a lot of students struggled to identify how a charge at rest would respond to a magnetic field. We were able to use how a wire with no current running through it responded to revisit the idea that charges must be moving.

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Chemistry: Nuclear Reactions

Students did some problems predicting the products of nuclear reactions. This year, I really emphasized applying a conceptual understanding of conservation of mass to balancing chemical reactions, and that provided a good foundation for nuclear reactions. Even though the elements involved were changing, students were nicely primed to think about these reactions in terms of conserving protons and neutrons instead of elements.

Day 108: Balances & Isotopes

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Physics: What does a balance measure?

A couple of students turned in their work from yesterday to my sub, and I saw they pretty consistently interpreted the balance in the video as measuring mass rather than force. To help clear that up, I took a balance on the school elevator and recorded some video. We started by drawing some free-body diagrams, then connected those to changes in the reading on the balance to get at what the balance is really measuring. From there, students whiteboarded and shared their answers to yesterday’s activity.

Chemistry: Isotopic Pennies

To introduce the idea of isotopes, students got sealed jars with 10 pennies and had to determine how many of their pennies were made before 1982 without opening the jar.

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Day 107: Wire in a B-Field & Hydrocarbons

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I was chaperoning an AVID college visit today, so all my classes had subs.

Physics: Wire in a B-Field

Since we don’t have a current balance (and I haven’t had a chance to build one), I had students watch a YouTube video and work through some questions about the forces on the wire.


Chemistry: Hydrocabons

Students used the textbook to get an intro to some terms related to hydrocarbons and organic chemistry.

Day 106: Whiteboarding & pH Lab

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Physics: Whiteboarding

Students whiteboarded their solutions to yesterday’s problem. In my class of 15, I had students present while in my class of 35, I tried a gallery walk, instead. I really liked the gallery walk with the big class; it gets hard to hear from everyone with that many people in the room, so talking about each board in smaller groups made it possible for more students to both ask and answer questions.

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Chemistry: pH Lab

Students did a lab to find the pH of household chemicals. Students did a nice job of connecting the properties of each chemical to the properties of acids and bases.

Day 105: Magnetic Force Problems & Gallery Walk

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Physics: Magnetic Force Problems

Students worked on some problems calculating the magnetic force on a current-carrying wire and a moving charge. Tomorrow, we’ll whiteboard the problems.

One of my students was eager to tell me about his visit to University of Minnesota-Duluth on Friday. He got a chance to hear from a physics professor about the use of inquiry, collaboration, and discovery learning in the physics courses, including why UMD takes that approach. The student was very excited to tell me UMD’s intro physics sounds just like my class, but with calculus, and that I must know what I’m doing if I’m teaching the same way as a professor. February and end of tri are always draining, so it was nice to get this boost from a student.

Chemistry: Gallery Walk

A lot of students in this class are very uncomfortable presenting whiteboards, so I decided to do a gallery walk. Each pair prepared a whiteboard of their solution to one of the problems and I checked their work. Then, one partner took their sheet and visited other whiteboards while the other partner stayed put to answer any questions on their solution. One student went above and beyond writing out the work for their solution, so her board was a very popular stop!

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Day 104: Electromagnets & Neutralization

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Physics: Electromagnets

We finished Friday’s lab exploring electromagnets and students compared results. I had students look for as many ways as they could to change the properties of the field around the electromagnet. I was surprised to have several groups decide to try flipping the nail in their electromagnet to test what effect that had. I was glad they did, because it reinforced that the nail itself was not the source of the magnetism.

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Chemistry: Neutralizaiton

I did some grade checks during class on Friday, so the students weren’t asking very many questions on the neutralization worksheet and, as a result, almost no one had gotten past the example I did on Friday. We spent some time revisiting how to write the equation for a neutralization reaction and students got some time to work.

Day 103: Electromagnets & Neutralization

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Physics: Electromagnets

Students built electromagnets, then started exploring to try and describe the shape and direction of the magnetic field and to find ways to affect the magnetic field. A lot of groups were quick to come up with tests to see if the electromagnets behave like bar magnets.

 

Chemistry: Neutralization

Students practiced writing equations for neutralization reactions and predicting the products. The biggest challenge was how many different ideas, including formula writing and balancing equations, they had to combine. My students got very good at both of those skills, but we didn’t use them much the last two weeks, and some students struggled to rediscover their previous fluency. I need to do a better job of spiraling some of these key concepts so that students don’t have the opportunity to get rusty.

Day 102: Kirchoff’s Rules Revisited & PPM

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Physics: Kirchoff’s Rules Revisited

Since the last quiz over Kirchoff’s Rules didn’t go as well as I’d hoped, we took some time to revisit the concepts and try a few more problems. Students left a lot more comfortable. They also really responded to an analogy I got from Kelly O’Shea thinking of current as people flowing through a hallway. It was pretty easy to get them to see that adding a new route in the halls made it easier to get around, which helped them get that adding a parallel branch actually reduces the resistance.IMG_1674

Chemistry: Parts Per Million

Today, students did some calculations using parts per million as a measure of concentration. They were pretty surprised at how small a number you get when you convert ppm into a percent concentration by mass, along with the fact that those low concentrations are really pretty significant in their impacts.

Day 101: Right Hand Rule & Solubility

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Physics: Right Hand Rule

I introduced students to the right hand rule, then had them work through some problems applying it. Next year, I need to get some concrete, first-hand examples; I’d love to find a beefy enough horseshoe magnet to deflect a length of wire. Students did make some nice connections to projectile motion when looking at the path of a charged particle.

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Chemistry: Solubility

We had some post-lab discussion on yesterday’s solubility lab. I tried to focus the conversation on evidence, since my students often get caught up in focusing on the answer alone. We also talked about some graph interpretation, such as what their sugar dissolved vs. temperature graphs should look like if there were no relationship and why many of their graphs look linear, while the “real” graph is a curve.

Day 100: Magnetic Field from a Wire & Solubility of Sugar

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Physics: Magnetic Field from a Wire

Students made some observations of the deflection of a compass around a current-carrying wire. Results were okay; I think I need to find some resistors that can handle bigger currents to make the effects more visible.

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Chemistry: Solubility of Sugar

Students measured how much sugar they could dissolve in water at different temperatures to produce a solubility curve.